


A greyscale

by LEAF (Leaf_lee218)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 17:40:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29613027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leaf_lee218/pseuds/LEAF
Summary: Guilt is a burden that generates all kinds of symptoms in Erwin.
Relationships: Levi Ackerman/Erwin Smith
Kudos: 10





	A greyscale

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there, this is just a first attempt of me writing in English. I would appreciate any corrections or suggestions, I know this fic is not only weird in the theme but weirdly (bad) written.

**A GREYSCALE**

* * *

**Chapter 1**

* * *

He wakes up every day, refreshed. And he hates the feeling. He wants to feel the guilt, but the flavor is perhaps very subtle, or he has lost the sense of taste, because his body wakes up so weightless, and only in one of many full moons the memory of a phantom limb rushes by pure biology. Neither all the lives he sent to the battlefield or the orphan faces haunting him during the slumber can end the drought in his eyes. “It's because you never did it out of malice,” Levi tells him, the patient Levi, the brute Levi, over and over while he cleans the tables, when the clients have already left.

Except Erwin, who has stopped giving excuses to be there.

“I am not…”

“This is what you are not,” Levi says this time, while he finishes placing the slab to dry; his suspicious breath, his red eyes from how grey they are, warn Erwin. “You’re not mean, you’re not unfair, you’re not selfish, you’re not a coward. You are desperate for punishment because you are afraid of forgiveness and human kindness. After seeing so much corruption in humanity, it is frightening to think that something as simple as compassion comes from such dark hearts, huh?”.

“Do you think I am a masochist?”, Erwin asks.

“Maybe. Few are the ones who can afford such luxury. And since you've been forgiven, you’re probably on your way to it", Levi replies.

Erwin looks down. Cups drip at the edge of the sink, a few drops on his shoe.

“I am not…”

“You could just accept what happens to you,” Levi interrupts. “But for some reason, I do not understand, you’re obsessed with punishment. Be careful, Erwin. Because a sought punishment implies more pleasure than pain”.

Erwin does not say more. He stands next to Levi until the man orders him to place a couple of cups, the teapot and dishes on the kitchen table. There are two pieces of cake of the day that Levi himself serves once he is satisfied with the cleaning. And Erwin recreates himself in deconstructing the scene, fragment by fragment, so that the important of the anodyne fills the rest of his days.

They talk about politics: corruption is not a benign tumor that is cured once removed. So, it has grown again but this time the roots are friends and they feel too responsible to weed the new tumors. They talk about the war: there are no more titans and now the commercial empires recruit their own armies, the Legion, the Stationary and the Military choose their own sides. They talk about strawberries: Levi will not make strawberries tarts until the next season, because he has learned about the violence behind the trade. Erwin wants to convince him to buy the locals but Levi tells him that they also try to take advantage in their own way.

“The thing with humans,” Levi says, wiping crumbs from the corners of his flushed lips, “is that we are as bad as we are good ... Evil acts can bring good consequences and vice versa. Maybe you’d be better off in a corrupt government looking to take revenge against you, huh?”

Erwin smiles. He likes Levi’s raw burgundy sincerity. Because, he has realized, by now he would have become a ghost without that man who throws him into the land of reality: not Hell on Earth or a promised Paradise, but the mundane earth.

“For these strawberries to grow so fat and sweet,” Levi continues, “a lot of shit was needed, Erwin.” He takes a bite. The strawberry between his teeth dyes his pale lips red. A red that contrasts with his pink tongue, the orange tone of the tea in the cup, the bleeding bodies on the battlefield and his own body tortured by the Military Police. “Come on”, Levi says after a few seconds chewing and then swallowing. He stretches half of the bitten strawberry to Erwin’s mouth.

And Erwin snorts, rejecting the offer. The trembling lips. The eyes wet but imperceptible.

“It’s not shit”, Levi replies, the face as terrible as a forest that animals have abandoned by instinct, “but it fed on it.” His face relaxes and he devours the piece in one bite. “You have problems accepting reality, right?”, he says with his mouth full.

Erwin nods.

“That’s why you are making this trip then. At least it’s not because you want to find an excuse to die,” Levi continues.

Erwin makes a spasm that he hopes it will be interpreted as he is nodding.

“There is no such thing as forgiveness from the righteous, Erwin. There are no righteous in this world. And do not even think about using the brat as a scapegoat. Because being a child is just a phase, he would not be one now, and probably stopped being one long before what your standards decided to impose as adulthood.”

Levi pauses and Erwin realizes that he has had his eyes glued to the table all that time.

“Look at me when I talk to you,” Levi says in a polite tone. Erwin obeys him. “I want you to tell me you’re making this trip because you do not know who you are and you are trying to understand it. You are looking for something impossible and probably would not find it. You are looking for horror in its pure state since the good that you found was always stained with imperfections. Because, I swear Erwin, if you’re going to die in the middle of nowhere surrounded by strangers, I’ll go to the end of the world in search of your body to desecrate it. Did you understand?”

Erwin blinks, his neck stiff, afraid of lying and of Levi fulfilling his promise eventually.

“Come back to die here and give me the pleasure of planning your funeral”, Levi says as he gets up. “I’ll prepare chicken and mayo sandwiches”.

This invention seems repulsive to Erwin, although Levi has taken an unhealthy like for it. And he realizes that when others make funerals to celebrate their dead, Levi can only celebrate his solitude if he prepares Erwin’s.

“You have to go”, Levi snorts

Silently, Erwin follows him to the door.

Levi dismisses him with an arched eyebrow and that glint in the eyes of someone who has forgiven himself long ago.

* * *

**Chapter 2**

* * *

On the afternoon of a Saturday during a gentle spring, Erwin Smith leaves with a caravan in the direction of the dunes. The boom has turned that cardinal point into an oasis. An oasis of salt. Countless miles of salt flats await him. However, a danger lurks silent and uncertain for the adventurers. They call them nomads. And they have no idea how they have survived to titans or Marleys all this time, but whatever their strategy, they have not served once the people of Paradis ruptured in freedom.

Finally, they arrive at the checkpoint, far from the “Fourth Wall”, one that did not exist actually and that is only a geographical reference that gives hope to the travelers that they are “not leaving home yet”, although there are more than two weeks between the Third Wall and the Fourth. The first thing that Erwin does after securing a room in the only little hotel-brothel, is to look for the location of the remains of the walls.

From the only surveillance post ,the blurry silhouettes can be seen with a spyglass. Erwin climbs the long stairs of that old shack, eight meters above the ground.

“They are only shadows,” says a guard inside the post, sitting on a chair covered with skins, while smoking his pipe. “You’re not the only one looking for that comfort, boy”.

Erwin leaves the spyglass and turns to look at the man, curious because it’s been too long since someone called him a boy.”

“Hansel”, Erwin hears the name through puffs of smoke from a mouth cracked more by the sun and the weather than by the years. That man cannot be older than him for more than half a decade.

“Erwin”, he introduces himself awkwardly, but Hansel does not seem to show interest in manners. Erwin knows that these are left aside in the expeditions due to urgency, but he has never seen anyone who gave the complete impression of having left them out of simple indifference.

Stunned by the unexpected presence of the guard, Erwin tries to scare away a fly that attacks him hovering. He raises the right arm but immediately the instinct causes him to replaces it with the left one. Guilt makes him more invalid than his miraculous healthy body.

“’bout the arm?”, Hansel asks interpreting Erwin’s gesture as pain and not as a guilt, then rests his back against the warm wood of the wall, legs open showing pants patched too many times and boots that have long ago fulfilled their mission and beg for a retirement.

“A titan”, Erwin replies. Hansel grunts, and Erwin feels that is the only act of interest that man will show for his self-declared disability.

Hansel removes the pipe from his mouth, throws the ash on a ceramic ashtray on the table and hits his leg with the object.

“During the fourth expedition of reconquest of territory, in Valle Bonito, a nail was buried in my leg while we were napping on the route. It was noon then and…”

The gangrene had surprised the expedition on their first trips. Erwin has made a calculation, and sick soldiers during these travels abound more than he could ideally expect. But a nail is different from a titan, he thinks to himself. That man who exhales and inhales mediocrity seems to not understand it. He has not asked Erwin for details, and yet he gives them as if Erwin had come to collect his one especially.

That guy, Erwin thinks, he will forget him the next day when the group leaves. He will leave behind his wooden leg, his gnawed clothes and that guard house where he lives more than guards. There is nothing to guard, Erwin smiles to himself, now that they have a fucking, fat and overflowing freedom like the bloody strawberry that Levi eats.

“I need to go”, he says.

Hansel responds with a spit that falls perfectly in a metal container before him. Erwin wants to think about Levi, how disgusting he would find that. But he does not allow it. Levi is a luxury on that trip. Almost a taboo. But deep inside he knows that it is out of fear of his own masochism, to lick himself in imagining Levi waiting for him without waiting for him. Would he buy flowers? Would he cry for me? His heart beats hard as he tries not imagine.

“I’ve seen lots like you”, Hansel says, probably because Erwin did not leave and the man speaks as long as he feels a presence there. “They look towards the walls as if there were something waiting for them there. As if the most important part of them was sheltered there. For that stupid belief is that these trips are allowed, as if the important thing were left safe”.

“You’re wrong”, Erwin replies then. “I have not left anything of value there ...”. _There is just nothing that deigns to wait for me,_ he thinks to himself, _I only have bile and defeatism, and he will torture them as best as he knows._

“It’s good then, a different man around here, huh?” Hansel laughs with his whole body, a hoarse noise coming from deep in his chest, sliding between his stained teeth. “Because whatever is left there, it rots. The men who manage to return, their silhouettes have been changed by the salt flats, and whatever they left behind will no longer fit into them. They hate the salt flats, they hate those nomadic blacks, and yet once they’ve seen that…” He turns his head towards the wooden wall behind him, and Erwin feels an invisible window that shows him a vision that constricts his heart. “They can only think of the dunes, count all the different colors in that white, and they lose the notion of depth, your heart becomes dry, salt steals your soul and tears.”

“You seem to know the salt flats well,” Erwin says.

Hansel turns to the window that looks at the walls.

“It sounded nice, uh? Everything I said, right?”, he smiles. “But the truth is that salt dries your skin but time is what makes it impossible for you to return. You cannot travel in time”, Hansel sighs. “Once you take a stepf forward, it is impossible to retrace it without destroying the trace you left and the one you left when you created it.”

For a moment, Erwin is paralyzed, observing Hansel’s leonine hair, the Golden is still surviving between the silver, his blue eyes, his Roman nose, his large body awkwardly distributed and the sweat on his skin thanks to the hell house, and a hat that barely covers him when he walks under the immemorial sky. For a second, Erwin sees himself. Spitting tobacco, a hook instead of wooden leg and sour words to the new traveler, between wanting to warn him, wishing he were lost, knowing that no matter what he says, he cannot change the foolishness that a man claims to call destiny... purgatory.

Almost immediately, Erwin is standing in a dirty house with a bitter man who is not him. Or maybe not yet.

“But you cannot travel in time”, he says out loud in consolation.

The man only moves his head. Hansel seems to be satisfied with his contribution, and now ignores Erwin with his whole body.

Erwin finally leaves the house, the change in temperature does not surprise him as much as his retinas suffer when they have to get used to the sunshine. They have nineteen days with good weather (which there is never) to reach the salt flats.

* * *

**Chapter 3**

* * *

Ten days after, one night on the plains, Erwin wakes up when he hears a dry cry. He leaves his tiny tent and walks through the dozing men in the camp. Several meters away he can distinguish the bonfire and the guards. They are distracted. They have never seen dark men and most likely believe they are myth, as titans are now. But Erwin had the opportunity to meet them, or better to say “suspect them”, only once, years ago during one of the first expeditions outside the walls. He can remember the dark of their skins, black as the hair of the Ackerman. Shining against the radiant sky. Several soldiers confused them with demons at first sight. But the veterans were there to avoid stupidity. From the boulder, at a smart distance, he was able to notice the group stopping, and to the date he can swear he felt those eyes on him as much as his own stare was on the faceless leader he never crossed words with. Each group continued on its way and he didn’t have any news about them until after a couple of years, when a group of soldiers returned with some heads and he could see them closer. The swollen lips, the skin of the color of coffee, the reddish sclerotic. Some soldiers are now engaged in hunting them and the tales have spread throughout the walls. That’s why Erwin does not really consider them enemies. Paradis started it. He blames them when he finds out that a squad has been massacred. He does not blame them when the bodies return in such state that Hanji dares him to give a look. That does not mean he will not defend himself or kill them in case he meets them. It’s just that he understands them. The men from the walls were looking for it, there is no other excuse, there is no excuse like the rest of the world. Hate is fresh, not a burden being carried from previous generations.

The crying returns, like a secret whisper. Erwin understands that maybe it caught his attention because once ago he was used to taking care of each soldier as a precious asset. When the heads in the Legion needed to be counted. When he knew that many of them were children who should be playing or studying and not dying on the battlefield. He never tucked them in, never treated them as his own. But he was aware of their fears, which were once his own because he was also a fourteen-year-old recruit with a loaded weapon and the temptation of leaving the squad in a blink.

But that cry is not from a child. It comes from a man who has survived the walls. And Erwin’s heart is constricted with fury and envy. Who is missing that wretch? What kind of luxurious life that guy has lived to end up shedding tears in the middle of nowhere under the cover of certain death?

He becomes angrier when he feels his own wet eyes. _How do you dare? There is no way in which I shed a tear in this place far from the world, one step away from the ambitions of humanity, there is no way I can’t spill Levi and leave him in a place like this. The earth is thirsty, it would suck my memories, and I would not allow myself to give anything to that cursed land for which I fought so much._

The tear falls on his palm and he return it to his body licking it.

* * *

**Chapter 4**

* * *

Prostitutes are not a novelty for Erwin. But since Levi told him about Kuchel, an instinct took possession of him about these women. He cannot touch or desire them without feeling a knot in his stomach and a feeling of guilt. Erwin does not see Kuchel in these wretched women, probably kidnapped because no one in their right mind would end up working in a brothel in the middle of nowhere on their own volition. Erwin does not see Kuchel in those women, but in the knot of his stomach the guilt swirls for his own mother. Because while Erwin knows that it was the government who killed his father, he is probably guilty of the death of his own mother. He never talked to her again since he enlisted and the news of her physical death made him sick for a few days he had to pretend he had the flu. Thinking about his mother is a job too human for someone like him. Levi did not rescue his humanity for that. He apologizes to her, which is the only thing he can beg as a son.

Never again has he sought the warm lap of a woman after Marie. And even the memory of Marie tastes too much about the mother he did not dared to look for again. When he said to himself that with a man would be different, he found comfort in Levi’s eyes. In the captain’s title he gave him, he felt the maternal smile and the father’s approval. In his training, he found again the solace of a family trip. But for a selfish manipulator, Erwin ended up involved in his own tricks like a naive child. When he wanted a gun, Erwin found a friend. When he wanted a bloodhound, Erwin found a brother. When he wanted a demon, Erwin found-

Erwin asks for another glass to stop thinking. To not give him verbs and other names. This trip is supposed to be about his fault. About his life too. When he thought that life had no meaning, and the question to that meaning was the enormous sadness in his chest, Levi challenged the inventions of heaven, hell and destiny, and turned the future, the hopes, of a child into a cold statistic: children are but a stage of men unless you kill them before they stop being children, the only way to be a child forever is to kill them while they are. Perhaps the spell of his terrible logic is what keeps him dry. Every time he thinks of Armin Arlert, he cannot help but see himself in a tormenting vision of what he must have been, perhaps where guilt is not the foundation of the freedom of humanity. He immediately gets scared, and because he gets scared he repents. That poor child must have grown up to be everything he could not and therefore to be what he would never be again. Erwin is happy to be alive with a sigh of relief at the death of the one who he never was. Only sometimes he is able to stop being so selfish and see Armin Arlert as Armin Arlert and not as everything he is not. It hurts then and a lot. And even then, he cannot cry.

Between the smell of burnt tobacco, rancid odors, piss and sex, Erwin Smith feels instinctively glad to be alive. And shame eats his ears and neck. He cheers, half drunk, to the name of Armin Arlet and all those stages of the man he never became, all those Armin Arlet are still his responsibility.

* * *

**Chapter 5**

* * *

He has sneaked and listened to the leaders planning the last part of the route. He has remade the plan in his mind but has not said anything. He is nothing in that group. He is another retired soldier.

Or maybe he just wants to die.

He blinks and in the long process the silhouette of Levi appears. The sun shine plays a trick on him and Levi stays stuck red in his retina, like the sunset that covers the desert with bloody shadows. Erwin spits out the taste of salt. It irritates him. It outrages him.

*******

He goes to sleep, early for a mercenary in the middle of a night in the salt flats, but not yet in The Salt Flats. Going to sleep early usually can mean two things. Or the incredible ingenuity of a novice, or the wisdom of a veteran. Erwin makes sure he looks even more useless than someone with no arms, and that helps him look useless enough so they do not want to steal neither ask him for advice. If they discover who he is... Erwin feels a tremor in his whole body, he does not want that attention, he does not want that hope or that ambition.

So that night he goes to sleep early, as he has done almost every day of camping. He gets into his tent, barely thirty centimeters in height, his boots come out on the other side, but it’s hot, even if it’s a desert, it’s night and it’s hot. He thinks is Hell. Maybe he inadvertently joined the wrong procession. His feet sweat inside his boots, but he cannot risk taking them off and someone stealing them. Mosquitoes want to deform his skin, have several bites on his arms and neck. He smells of burning and sweat despite the distance between the fires and the men. It sucks, everything sucks, and a salty taste does not leave him since they entered the salt flats. It is not like sea salt and sometimes even hurts while urinating. Erwin feels his armpits soaking wet, the hairs on his beard growing uncontrolled like all the hair on the rest of his body. Nobody could recognize him even if they tried. And now he debates, on that night of clean sky, between sleeping or listening to the whispers of the groups around the fires. They are planning, he knows, some plan to steal from the lonely, others plan to protect themselves by alliances between loners, the superiors plan to add a tax to take them back alive. Erwin wonders why he fought for a freedom like that. Levi would mock him, distant and beautiful as the starry sky, watching him with those eyes whose starlight reveals that the Bing-bang and supernovas happened in his life so long ago, that there is nothing new for him but only experience. Who would you judge from among those men who are conspiring, Erwin?, Levi would say. You would be surprised to find out who is the one who lost a loved one and who is returning to one. Would that make it easier for you to separate them into different groups? Erwin responds with a silent no. Himself, which side would he put himself on? How bad would it be depending on which side?

Do you hate that child, right Erwin? In this night of Levi’s hair color, he seems not to want to abandon his thoughts. Erwin responds that no, but Levi does not believe him. You do it, that stupid child that caused the death of you father... and not only that, they tortured him, Erwin. Can you imagine your own father, your dear father, that man who cared for you and had so much faith in humanity, who only wanted to help the new generations grow a little better, imagine how he suffered when his fingers were ripped off, his teeth? Did he have died thinking that they would go after you? Or that they had already reached you? I bet you, Erwin, that at some point he thought, “that damn son, he was the one”, but you want to believe they killed a good man and that he immediately repented of his ill thoughts and died probably loving you very much.

Yes, yes, I hate that shitty child, Erwin thinks. How much has he changed since he was only ten years old? How difficult is to see yourself in that naive child that killed by pure naivety and innocence. He hates him. He hates his audacity and his ignorance, but above all he hates that he had so much faith and that he loved his father so much. And he hates to hate his father so much. There is too much hate for someone who received the grace of a second chance.

* * *

**Chapter 6**

* * *

It’s early morning when Erwin wakes up to feel a strange pressure on his chest. His other senses perk up, and he can smell burning and blood. He suspected it, but he was negligent. Because he’s just a one-armed man who will come back with a sack of salt if he ever comes back. Judging by the screams, he might not even come back with his remaining arm. Someone has pulled the tent out of him using a body for that. That’s the extra pressure that he feels. And from his luxurious view, he can watch shadows beating shadows. Shots too.

The fire is spreading. They have been taken by surprise, judging by the innocence of the guards. Erwin watches and meditates. Why get up? To save a life? To die? “I am lazy”, he says to himself. Levi would surely scoff, and without waiting for him to change his mind he would rise up to fight for a humanity that Erwin swears he does not see in the midst of that slaughter.

And then he sees it, while he is still lying as long and useless as he is, but he sees those eyes of yesteryear, in a face that is lost in the night. He almost immediately feels the tip of a long spear on his neck and when he changes the direction of his eyes upward, he sees another nomad ready to give him a fleeting end. But the one pointing the spear yells something in his tongue, the one they have not yet been able to reach, and the nomad withdraws his attack and walks away from them. The leader does not break the distance created by the spear, that would destroy the delicate balance between the two bosses that were suspected years ago. And that would play against Erwin’s life. If the leader walks up and sees him as he is now, he would probably finish him off himself, disappointed and upset.

They take the sacks of salt, food and some men. And they leave as they appeared, with Erwin fluctuating in unconsciousness. But for one last time he can see the gaze of the leader, all black him, all leader, all eyes him, yellow and old, faded and tired. Erwin suddenly suspects him and wonders about the misfortunes that man has had to survive in these years, he wonders the answers he found for the hell he shared with Erwin, were the titans a punishment or part of nature? Who did he lose and how much guilt does he feel? Who did he abandon and who doesn't wait for him?

He is as black as night, Erwin thinks as everything turns red and the silhouettes of nomads are lost in the violence of a dawn that scratches Erwin’s retinas. Who could?, who?, with life in these colors... he thinks and he does not understands himself.

He dreams again. Waiting for the death. But it is a disappointment. He doesn’t see his life passing before his eyes. Levi appears before him leading two children, Eren and Armin, by the hand. “Died decades ago to give Commander Smith more years”, says his father, sitting on a rock a short distance away. Marie breastfeeds a faceless child in front of him.

“Things would have been different if he approached. He would have done you the favor you were looking for. Leader to leader, he would have killed you, a bad version of the man he ran into years ago”, Levi says. Eren breaks free from his grip and runs until he is lost in a nearby forest. Beastly screams are heard. “It was in his nature, even towards the end, when he was less of him, more less of him than what you are now regarding the old Erwin that you miss, even when Eren got lost among Grisha, Kruger and all those names, he found a way to die in his own way”.

Levi lets go of Armin’s hand and the boy walks over to Erwin. “I had a lot to see in this world, and suddenly I didn't have it anymore. I did what I could, but all that pity you give about me, it’s just your ego jerking off on your own wound. You like to fantasize all those “what if” of my life, but you will never know. And you love that suffering, when you imagine my achievements and my triumphs, when my dreams become the highest moral ideals in this world. It is repulsive”.

“You can’t even mourn an innocent man properly”, Marie says. Erwin looks for his father, but he doesn’t say anything.He wants him to speak, but it seems that he smells his desire, the more he wants him, the more his father’s lips tighten, like in a childish grin.

“He’s not going to talk to you”, Levi says. “Just like no one here is really talking to you, Erwin. Even the Marie you see looks like the one you left at the bar when you were a cadet, not the woman you’ve seen countless times over the years”.

“But you, Levi”, Erwin trembles.

“You’re not talking to me, Erwin. And who knows if you would ever have time to do it before I join them too and turn into a shadow that you voice according to the tragic scripts you create in your mind to play your masochistic games”. Erwin crackles a laugh and then ends up laughing uncontrollably. “It’s a lonely world”, Levi continues, “with only the echoes of your remorse playing the role of the people you want to apologize to”.

"Of them all”, Erwin gasps between a sob, “why are you the most difficult of them all?”

“I have an idea because I’m just a projection of you, but the real Levi doesn’t even know that you want to apologize for something”.

“Just look at me”, Erwin snaps through tears, it’s not a pretty cry, it’s not an aesthetic lament and the nose is flowing and the saliva falls uncontrollably from his mouth while he doesn’t stop sweating before the inclement sun. “I'm stained”, he gasps, raising his arms, “everything is dirty red”, he barks and he begins to beat the sand with his arm, rubbing the grains in a vain attempt to remove the stains.

He screams inconsistencies for long hours ignoring the survivors who walk in their own hells in search of meaning in their lives. In front of him, Levi squats down at him, with a kind and calm gesture.

“What am I going to do with these colors”, Erwin finally mutters, the sand getting into the scratches and sores.

“Which colors?”, someone asks, interrupting Erwin. Erwin doesn’t know who, “man” says the stranger, “this… all this is devouring us… the white, the white has left nothing…”, and the man is lost among all those survivors.

Levi lifts his face and Erwin follows his gaze. Then he sees it.

The smoke, the ashes, the debris, the whole sun is burning and the sun is eaten away by the white of the salt flats. Only then does Erwin feel his body burn like never before. He hurts so much that Erwin realizes that he is alive, that there are nineteen survivors and a food cart and that his eyes are open so much that the rays of the sun tears his retinas. And he smiles at all this. He laughs like a few around him laugh too. They laugh for different reasons, but in this lands they have the same tone.

And finally, Erwin nods and decides to go home stained with blood to be greeted by his equally stained bloody Captain.

And his face turns into horror at the red that escapes from him like the rest of the colors. But then he imagines Levi smiling as he steals the color from his flushed cheeks, and the color escapes faster from Erwin’s eyes and he just begs for one to stay so he can watch at those eyes and only those.

And the world is not red anymore, but grey. A rainbow in those eyes.

And then Erwin feels solace and forgiveness in a complex grey scale.

It does not matter that there are no more colors, he does not deserve them or want them.

And a grey rainbow is a rainbow anyway.

And he and Levi will entertain themselves until the end of their days naming all those grey.


End file.
